Only a year after I finally managed to track them all down on CD, Cherry Red is going to reissue the entire Felt backcatalogue, presumably remastered and with actual cover art instead of the crap blank sleeves that came with the Creation issues. Hopefully this won't happen too soon for me to dump mine to unsuspecting Ebay buyers and make a wad of cash (Bubblegum Perfume was going for around $200 last year, but I see it's only bringing in about a tenth of that these days, which leads me to suspect the Felt fans are too web savvy for my unethical auctioning plans).

Review: Piano Magic, "Speed the Road, Rush the Lights"
Well, I didn't expect this. Piano Magic convincingly rocks out with their cocks out on the title track and even throw in a little Frippy guitar wank on top of a thick bed of keyboards and the result is something decidedly un-Piano Magic-like. Glen manages to sing well throughout. Resistant fans will hate it beyond words, but if you try to forget that this is Piano Magic, it's really enjoyable. The second track is a piece of instrumental guitar picking, typically pretty. The third track is a bluesy prog pastiche with nods to Dagmar Krause and Van Der Graaf Generator. Compared to their last single, the tepid "I came to your party dressed as a shadow," this is a piece of sonic brilliance. Compared to "Popular Mechanics" and "A Trick of the Sea" it's a totally different band.

Labels: piano magic, reviews

Stylus makes a good case for Sonic Youth's "Dirty" and mentions that "Hipsters HATE this album", which may or may not be true. I loved SY before Dirty and liked the album when it came out but when I look back on everything, I realize this was the point where I began to loose interest, although I know it got a good year's worth of CD-player time in my first away-from-the-parents apartment. Now when I return to it, the only song that really holds interest is "JC," because I still, to this day, don't know what the lyrics are about, but they conjure something forest-y, something gun-metal grey, something red, something wrong.